Reasons I am ^_^ today:I found out that Ishbal is actually Ishval according to the official site, and that means my name is in it! Go me!I thought I was behind in making travel arrangements/ hotel reservations for the state convention in June, but I'm not! Hooray!I got some kudos for fixing lots of annoyances this morning. Well, the annoyances were hella annoying, but I rock!I got paid today! W00t!

Reasons I am -_- today:I didn't register for art school in time. I suck!The phone rang all morning then I had to have a meeting - yawnfest!I want a new car but I don't want to clean the old one. Beh.I don't know when Holly's dance recital is, and it might be on A-kon day, but I don't know, so I can't really make plans as much as I'd like. Poopies.I am out of smokes! *homicidal rage*

They're talking of chartering a bus to Houston. That would be so awesome, except for the no smoking part. It would be like college! Well, perhaps we'd be a little more civilized than we were in college, but it would be way cool. I wish the cute guy would sit by me! (Now I'm being insane. The cute guy doesn't live in the state, and he's probably in the other party, so why would he go to our state party convention. I'm only leaving out the party names so I don't accidentally embarrass my party with my goofiness. But it would still be cool if the cute guy was on the bus. Then it really WOULD be like college, trying to jockey for position next to the object of your desire? Or wait, that might be high school. Either way, it would be youthful fun! This is the longest parenthetical I've ever made! I'll probably end up sitting next to someone annoying who has a crush on me. Should I try to smuggle dirty comics onto the bus? This should be fun!)

Anyway, there you have it. Also, check out my layout in makaioh and tell me how to improve it. I suck.

Seriously, the biggest problem I see is contrast. Your "one too many burritos" brown is too close to tone with your background, so it's not easy on the eyes to see where one post ends and another begins. (I do see that there are breaks in between your cells. Note that I didn't say I couldn't tell, but that it's not easy on the eyes.)

Your text just seems like a lighter shade of it, rather than wihte or some constantly color. Far too much "neutral", not enough "not so neutral".

Now, if it were my journal, I wouldn't go this route at all, so what I suggest is purely about if it fits into Vals' style or not - it defintely doesn't fit into mine: Try an image as the background for those cells - perhaps a different image for the right and left columns. As long as the colors don't clash or heavily differ in your background image, and the text contrasted enough, it should work.

You could take a image from a screencap or site, clean it up, bleach it so that there isn't a heavy contrast, and then colorize it so that the core colors match what you want - you need not restrict yourself to using the specific colors that the image just happens to use. For text, the best bet is pure black or white, but failing that go with some other extreme - save the muted tones for special text, not your body text.

Anyway, that's all the advice I can really give that I guess you'd consider. Failing that, you could use the insurance money ;)

Depending on what you're thinking, I either might be able to help you out, or I can tell you to not bother, because some techniques for that completely slow PC machines to a crawl. We went through hours of tweaking on a friend's site before we found out that one of the most badass elements of his design was killing every PC I loaded it on - some with some otherwise impressive silicon balls.

Ryan now I have a really obnoxious problem. I made this gorgeous layout (haven't finalized colors yet, but gifs and pngs are set) and when I hosted the files locally and tested it, these 4 pngs that make a circle were perfect. Now that they're uploaded to my server, there's space in between, no matter how many border=0 and padding=0 i add to whatever! What happen?(it is perfectly acceptable to curse me for being stupid.)

I don't see anything like that on the page. If they are there, what are you referring to? If not, could you reproduce the problem? I need to see the code and the render to see what's up. Feel free to post a screenshot and doodle on it. Feel free to eat bacon.

If you like, we could take this to e-mail. Or continue as an LJ comment thread. Or use the mind powers that we don't tell anyone about. (Luckily the only other ones who will respond to this are slaves under our control - all others will simple ignore it.)

I like what you currently have up better - much improved. Easier on the eyes.

As another design comment, you probably like the flatness of the cells, but have you considered using borders to give it a raised look? Like button shading, where the top/left has the light colors, and the bottom/right the darker colors, giving it that 3D look? Or maybe just the bottom/right, forgoing a border elsewhere. That might have the potential of appearing nicer, or appearing like crap, but if you're curious give it a whirl.

Did I link you to the test site?http://home.comcast.net/~valla5/test_html.htmlI'm using IE, and if things don't work in IE then it'll all be for naught. I've changed my mind about what I want the background of the entries to look like. I'm going to set a color (not sure what color yet) and then use that background gif like is behind the text on that test page to give it some texture.My main problem is the circle. There are gaps in my circle, and that just won't do. The code doesn't have all the style elements I mentioned, but I tested those on my local machine and they didn't fix the problem. I am going insane. I'm at work, so LJ comments are the same as email, either way you wanna go. valla5@comcast.net

You have two ways to solve this (well, actually more, but here's how to easily solve it):1. Combine lines 3 thru 8 on that test HTML into one line - those spaces are being caused by the whitespace characters from your returns being printed.2. If you want or need the returns in there, put them *inside* your tags. Like instead of:</a><a href="...">Do:</a><a href="...">

And the return won't be part of the render, since it's inside the tag.

Other alternatives include putting them into an inline table or making one image and linking with an imagemap. You also don't need to end a span and immediately open it back up. Doing:<span stuff="here">foo</span><span stuff="here">bar</span>

I fixed that, but damn it was annoying. Now I'm just editing the <table> tags in the original Generator code. I'm going to add something cool to the subject headers later, too. It's coming together, except for font. Thanks muchly for looking at that. It really pisses me off when my html does stuff with whitespace. I need my whitespace to keep my head clear!

I'm going to do something with another screencap I have, that is just slightly disturbing even if you *haven't* seen the show. I'm not sure how I'm going to implement it, though. And I might make the transmutation circle like, fixed or absolute or whatever, so it sorta resembles frames. I know you know what I'm talking about!

I dig. Word of advice thought - the "überl33t" fixed/float CSS doesn't always work the same in all browsers. I know what you're talking about, and I've honestly never been happy with the results of my own experiments with building such navigation systems. But then I put further contraints on myself back then, and adhering to stadnards and cross-OS, cross-browser compatibility, etc.

But, of course, I'm still around if you gots questions or just wanna boucne something offa me.